But what if there was a new hashing algorithm, which even on
a very fast computer could only compute one hash a second?
...Then no one would use it. Imagine a multi-user system with even a
few dozen users on at a time... Each time one of them logged on, or
changed passwords, or SU'd, or did one of the non-authentication-related
activities that would likely invoke a "good" hash (file validation,
activity on a very large DB, etc), there goes one second of CPU time.
It doesn't take much imagination to see the cumulative effects of that
as bring the system to its knees.
And even if the user(s) had no choice, either the admin or some new
law said "tough, use it anyway"? Well, then the obvious solution consists
of upgrading to a faster machine. And so, the "arms race" would start all
over again.:-)
One would think that a page with "watermelon"
in the meta tag would at least mention it in
the page itself...
Not a safe assumption. Let's say you write a
page about Fermat's theorem... You might include
the phrase "number theory" in the meta tags, but
not mention it anywhere on the page itself. That
would not count as either an oversight in the page
text, nor a misuse of meta tags.
However, I have a somewhat strange thought on
ways around the court's ruling... They only said
that the meta tags need to fit the page's content.
So what if the page specifically displays its
own meta tags at the bottom? They would then
match the page (even to a law-bot).
Overall, due to the vagueness and ease of
circumvention, I would consider this a more-or-less
meaningless ruling. It may provide a precedent for
future tangentially-related trials, but I highly
doubt we can apply it to the idea of spam-police
going around searching for improper use of meta tags.
Mind, the problem with this media, no matter
who much of a data hoarder you are (like me),
you'll find ways to fill it.
Hmm, I don't know about that. Personally, I
keep everything that hits my PC, and it adds
up, but still hasn't come close to
2TB...
About every two years I replace my fileserver's
smallest HDD with one roughly twice as large as
the current largest (so I basically append a
zero to the right end of the current size,
expressed in binary). Currently that means
almost a third of a terabyte after an upgrade
this spring.
This time, I've started keeping my CD rips in
a lossless format. Next time (which will
put me around 0.75TB) I will probably start
keeping raw DVD rips. After that, I don't
know what else I might keep that could use
so much room. Until now, audio and small
video clips have taken the bulk of the
space.
Although I know everyone who has ever said this
has later eaten their words, at the moment, I
really don't think any home computer
needs more than a few TB of storage.
But if the media is reliable enough, I wonder
what backup solutions coming out of this?
Ah, great point. That currently seems like the
biggest problem we have with storage - Not the
actual online storage, but the ability to keep
up-to-date backups. I've worked for the past
few weeks to backup my fileserver to DVD,
and still have a few more discs to go. Most likely,
at least a few of the over-50 DVDs I've created
have errors, and in the event my FS fries, I would
almost certainly lose something. Even Blu-Ray
doesn't look like that great of an alternative...
25GB doesn't suck, but it still means five discs per
100GB. After my next HDD addition, that will come
out to around 30 discs, almost the same situation I
have now (Yes, Blu-Ray theoretically holds a lot more,
up to 100GB for dual-sided dual-layer. But keep in
mind that DSDL DVDs hold almost 20GB, and we've
just now started seeing SSDL burners, with
media incredibly scarce and expensive).
So what do we need? A solution for making backups
of several hundred GB at a time, that doesn't cost
more than buying a similarly-sized IDE drive and
keeping it off-site (ie, tape backups, not even
counting the cost of the drive itself).
They clearly did not intend to pursue the
lawsuit in question, merely to make enough of
a gesture to arouse interest in certain tech
communities.
Bad move... Geeks, on the whole, do not count as
their target audience. Most geeks I know get
seriously annoyed at stories like KT's, and
wouldn't even read a book like hers if stricken
with dysentery and the label on all the shampoo
bottles disintigrated. "Aww, someone with
no clue about the dangers of rubbing themselves
down with raw meat and then playing with tigers
got hurt? Hear the violins?"
At best, we would spread the word to people
who might read it. But we can cause
a lot more damage than benefit (as shown
by Amazon needing to purge their comments
section this morning).
FYI- All of the states Attorneys General have
a "Consumer Protection Unit." They are charged
with protecting consumers from fraudulent
activity. That is why you as citizens are
considered consumers in the letter.
Fair enough. But... What product does this
involve? What form of fraud do these AGs wish
to protect the potential "consumers" of that
service from?
Offhand, I can't think of any way P2P impacts
actual "consumers" in a way that state AG
offices have any role in cracking down on.
It may cause people to stop consuming
certain products, when used illegally, but
stopping copyright violations does not equal
"consumer protection".
I'd have to agree, this seems like a very
strange choice of words to choose purely by
coincidence. I'd also consider it very strange
that 46 states AGs would all spontaneously
decide to crack down on P2P (regardless of
why they chose to go after them).
Someone holds the strings. Word choices can give
a clue as to the identity of the puppetmaster.
I would imagine that TV repairmen were originally regulated
because they had to know how to safely work on open TV cabinets
containing dangerous high voltages, operate test equipment on
those high voltage circuits, and install suitable replacement
parts that wouldn't catch on fire.
I worry about this particular money grab for
exactly that reason...
Everyone so far has complained that PC techs have very
little in common with TV repairmen, and should not need
licensure under the same rules.
I would point out the flip side to that - Under this wonderful
scheme, Lousiana would suddenly have a lot of "licensed"
TV repairmen who had no clue how to safely (or
successfully, for that matter) repair an actual TV.
My suggestion for all the geeks annoyed by getting such
a letter? Send in your $55, add "TV Repair" to your
shingle, and assuming you survive your first electrocution,
sue the hell out of the state for making you think you
had the skills needed to safely do that job... "Well,
they said I could, and in fact, they even said
I had to!"
Or is a 52 ounce Mountain Dew now a standard beverage for
normal college students?
Well, it makes a good start for the morning...
Keep in mind that a two-liter bottle contains (approximately)
67oz. So that just comes out to "take a big swig and pour
the rest of the bottle in a cup for the drive in".
Then later in the day, when that runs out, they can start
hitting the coffee.
I don't see the point in putting a traditional
infra-red laser when this obviously superior
laser can read all.
Okay, time for the day's lesson, "Color
transmittance and reflectance"...
For a pressed aluminum disc, you could use any
currently-available wavelength of LZD you
wanted, it will reflect them all very very
well.
For a burned disc, you don't have
just a pitted aluminum layer that either
reflects or disperses the light from the
drive. You have a dye that, due to the action
of a particular frequency laser shining on
it, has turned more-or-less permanantly opaque
(or transparent) to certain frequencies
of light.
The particular frequencies the dye will block
or let pass vary enormously on the
particular dye used, as well as the power and
frequency of the laser used for writing data.
So, while we finally have a fairly
standard set of DVD and CD dyes that work
with each other, that all changes when you add
in another frequency laser. Suddenly we'll find
ourselves back to the early days of CD-Rs, where
some drives could read some brands, and others
couldn't.
So what do I see as the problem here? Sure, Sony
can claim that their spiffy new drive will read
"DVDs" and "CDs"... By which they mean
pressed, commercially-manufactured DVDs
and CDs. Don't hold your breath for that to also
mean compatibility with either your particular
drive and/or your favorite brand of media to
burn to.
And rewritables? Don't feel too surprised
when we learn that sticking a rewritable
into a Blu-Ray just to try to read it has
the unintended side-effect of erasing it.
Now, if I felt like going into conspiracy-theorist
mode here, I would suggest that breaking compatibility
with home-burned media seems like a very nice perk
to all the Big Boys, who would love to put
the CD- and DVD-burner genie back in the bottle...
What about real peripherals? Ones you can't
emulate?
Fair enough point - But in that case, I would
have to consider the computer secondary
to the machine itself - I don't know your specific
situation, but the computer most likely did data
collection and analysis. The controller-proper
I would consider part of the "peripheral", and search
for the easiest-to-tap connection as the point to
break away from reality and into emulation.
I'll admit, I hadn't considered that point.
You can't emulate a fatigue testing machine. You
can't emulate a GC/MS. You can't emulate a CNC.
You can't emulate an MRI. But I see that as
similar to saying you can't emulate a car... You
could fake-out a car's computer, but it doesn't
do much good without car itself. Apples and Oranges.
So no, emulation won't solve all obsolescence
problems... But for those situations where you
wouldn't consider the computer as secondary to
the peripheral...
However - as I touched on above, you can almost certainly
still replace the computer portion of the system. At
some point, the computer just takes a digital input,
and at that point, you make the split from reality. My car
doesn't care if its own computer runs it, or a PC sitting
in the passenger seat. That might not do much to reduce
the maintenence costs of the primary machine involved,
but it does mean you can have your data on something other
than an ancient reel-to-reel...;-)
The problem is, emulators are all well and
good, until you actualy need to access a
periphrial.
So you emulate those, as well... And usually,
they take a lot less to emulate than the
core system.
As a trivial example, consider the peripherals
available even on previous-gen consoles... You
have 3rd party joysticks, mice, keyboards,
cameras, tape drives, printers(?), etc. All
those eventually end up emulated, if enough
people needed them.
The same goes for something like a PDP-11 or
VAX 11/750 or the like. You have some odd
storage devices (that store a tiny fraction
of modern HDDs, thus you can emulate them
with an image file). You have printers
(emulatable with... printers!). Perhaps
really ancient input devices such as a
cardreader (scanner -> conversion tool -> file).
No doubt other exotic peripherals exist, but
you can somehow emulate them all.
The conceptual problem with dealing with peripherals
I think lies in just how much we've advanced
since the days of Big Iron... Even for emulating
CPU-cycle-critical hardware interactions, you can
deal with it in emulation, by pure brute-force. Consider
the 11/780, which ran at a whopping 6MHz. On a modern
P4, that means you have over 500 CPU cycles
per emulated cycle (and while the P4 can push
through more than two ops per clock, the VAX
only managed one instruction per 6(?) clocks,
meaning you realistically have over six
thousand real instructions per emulated
one, on average). With six thousand instructions
to burn, you could emulate your VAX while still
getting a good framerate playing Super Metroid on
an emulated SuperNes in the foreground.
That I know of, only the humble old laserdisc
has thus far resisted attempts at perfect emulation,
due to using an analog encoding scheme (rather than
storing bits, it actually encoded the raw NTSC or PAL
signal handled by the TV. And depending on what sort
of access to them you need, even that problem has a
way around it, via an MPEG rip and a frame file (ala
Daphne).
It is also not acceptable to have a faulty
speedometer in a car.
The law does, however, allow tolerances
on both speedometers and radar guns, a point you
seem determined not to accept as a possibility.
Yet, either (or both, to a driver's combined
detriment) can go near the limit of their
allowed tolerance and not count as "faulty",
yet show a speed different from the car's "real"
speed.
No one argued what the law says. Some may call
it unfair or grounded only in profit, but we all
know what a speed limit of 50MPH means. However,
if you have overly zealous cops busting people
for doing 2MPH over, when both the
speedometer and radar guns have (as an example,
don't happen to know the exact tolerances off
the top of my head) a 5MPH tolerance, you have
a situation where compliance with the law becomes
a guessing game rather than a well-defined set of
rules.
You will note that I did not mention your
speedometer.
If you are DRIVING at a certain speed (and let's
call it 80mph for ease this time perhaps) that
is over the speed limit, then you are liable to
be penalised
So, by what magical means do you suggest a person
know their current speed, since you do not appear
to care about the tolerances allowed in existing
speed measurement devices?
Personally I can't wait to have averaging speed
cameras along the entire UK motorway and major roads
network.
Why, so you can keep paying to replace them when
pissed motorists trash them? Yeah, okay.
Actually, as much as the world seem to consider
the US concerned about privacy over almost everything
else, I wish we had the same sense of
civil disobedience you Brits have. From "Angle
Grinder Man" to traffic cameras having an average
lifetime of about three days... Here, we just
quietly put up with crap like that. Pathetic.
FAAC, in the highest quality mode it offers. If
you have gotten rips in 3x realtime, I have to
suspect that your encoder optimizes for speed
rather than quality. Sure, drop all the
settings down to their simplest, and it
will encode nice 'n zippy - But you get
something barely better than an MP3.
Then again, I haven't tried it in a few months.
Perhaps AAC encoders have made a huge leap
forward since then.
If anyone out there really wants to put
Real's crap on their iPod then I say let them.
I feel sorry for the people that think Real has
good software.
I'll agree with that 100%... I in no way meant to
defend Real in the sense of them having a format
worth using. But in the sense of "I own this
device, I want to play format X on it, they
have made it possible", I fully support
that. Kinda like the whole Hall/Voltaire
freedom of speech thing... "I disapprove of
what format you play, but I will defend to the
death your right to play it".
Actually, as an aside, I Like AAC. Take
away the DRM, and I'd probably use that over OGG,
even (I know, heresy <G>). But the encoding
process takes hours per song, and I don't
have the time (or a lab over which to distribute
the load) to re-rip my entire collection that
slowly.
Wow. The level of Apple fanboyism just blows me
away...
People work tirelessly to get Linux to run on the
XBox, against MS's wishes, and we cheer them on.
People modify their TIVOs, in violation of both
their warrantee and (probably) the DMCA, and we
ask how to do it ourselves.
A disposeable digital camera hits the market, and
do we feel "concern" that the poor manufacturer
will get raked over the coals as soon as a way to
get at the memory hits the 'net? Hell NO! We ask
where we can buy a few, anticipating the eventual
crack!
But Real, after trying to convince Apple
to make a deal with them, manages to open up the
iPod, a HARDWARE device that people BUY, to play
RealMedia content on, and suddenly everyone starts
crying for Apple and damning Real?
Pathetic. If you replaced "Apple/RealMedia" with
"Microsoft/Ogg", we'd have taken to the streets
ready to lynch Microsoft over their suppression
of open audio formats.
Please, people, try to use just a little bit
of introspection before jumping to Apple's defense.
Even try the example I gave above - If you replace
"Apple" or "Jobs" with "Microsoft" or "Gates", would
you feel the same? Or perhaps even more painful to
contemplate, what if Apple had hacked the Nomad,
against CL's wishes, to play their DRM'd AAC files?
"Bad, evil DMCA violation", or "noble and liberating
support of their customer's rights to use the music
they legitimately purchased"? If those don't hurt
to contemplate, well... "Denial ain't just a river
in Egypt".
If somebody made an eBook reader which
could display my content instead of theirs
(and which isn't particulary expensive), I'm
all for it.
I think the problem here stems from the
expectations of the eBook manufacturers...
They hope to get in on the start of a content
distribution system similar to a modern
video-game console - ie, total lock-in to
their chosen format and "branded" titles.
All via a hefty dose of two-way DRM (no
unauthorized content, and unauthorized
viewing of content on other devices).
I sincerely believe that, and that
alone, has caused the failure thus far of
the eBook.
Regarding the screen - An easy-on-the-eyes
display would go a long way toward
getting people to "snuggle up in bed" with
an eBook. But merely creating a display
that looks exactly like paper, with
the same easiness on the eyes, will not
make or kill eBooks. As an example, everyone
I know with a Palm (or similar portable)
stores at least a few books on it, reading
them when they have to wait somewhere
(airport, bathroom, boring meetings, etc).
If you've ever used a handheld to read
anything longer than notes to yourself,
you realize they do not make your
eyes happy. Yet people will still put in
10+ hours a week reading on one.
Book-like formats - Nope, these won't save
eBooks either. Referring back to people I
know who read books on their Palm, they
don't use any fancy text layout (at best,
HTML-like). They view plain text.
Overall, this boils down to basically one
point... CONTENT! Exactly as you suggest,
I require of any potential eBook that
I can go and download the entire Project
Guttenberg library, and instantly have
access to thousands of classic texts. It
should, at a minimum, have the ability to
process plaintext and HTML, and PDF would
help quite a bit as well (though I realize
that might involve nasty licensing issues,
and could live without it).
If the manufacturer wants to release their
own content optimized for their reader, hey,
cool, I have no problem with that. But if
they restrict me to what they release,
they can consider me a non-customer.
Two other, lesser points...
One, battery life. I can read for 8+ hours on
an old Palm. If an eBook reader doesn't have
a similar battery life, I would consider that
a BIG negative.
And two, physical media... Ideally, an eBook
reader would simply use either ISO9660-formatted
CDs (and as a bonus, let me listen to music
if I so desire it... No point in letting
existing hardware go unused), or have the
ability to see USB keychain-style drives.
I could burn anything I want to CD and/or
copy it to my keychain drive, and dump it
over to the eBook. No special cartridges
or proprietary cables to hook it up to
my PC/vendor kiosks... Just keep it
simple and well-known.
Its the fact that clusters require higher
skill to program efficiently for than do
single processor systems.
...vs This year's topology from Cray or SGI
or the like. Yeah, whatever.
If I know MPI (which I do), I can code on
any cluster out there, and it will perform
similarly, with a linear time dependance on
network speed. Including most
supercomputing architectures. By comparison,
if I know HPF, well, I can write code that
will at least run on most supercomputer
topologies, but run efficiently? All
at the whim of the manufacturer, and whether
or not they had my particular problem (or a
similar variant) in mind when optimizing their
compilers.
The other point is that by using off the
shelf parts, we are not really innovating in
this space like we should be.
Define "should"...
Customer X wants a supercomputer to perform
a few set tasks. He can pay you to "innovate",
or he can pay your competitor 3% of your costs
for a setup that will wildly outperform your
top-of-the-line machine. And you see a problem
with using commodity parts?
An important part of "innovation" involves making
the best use of what you have available today.
Sure, tomorrow that may mean quantum coprocessors,
and at the absolute limit, it may well mean coming
scarily close to breaking the laws of physics.
For the present, however, it means using a cluster
of Opterons.
For you to say "don't bother" is idiotic;
we're telling you "we enjoy this, so consider
making it and you can make good money if you
do it right."
Wow, relax! I think you took his point FAR
more harshly than he meant it...
Yes, games tend to have a few features that
universally waste time, which we would all
like eliminated. He mentioned that (the
long FMVs in FFX, as the example).
But playing an RPG requires time.
The entire point involves basically playing
out a book, with the best ones allowing
you to define the plot. If you reduce
that "book" to "Dick & Jane", sure, you
can commit less time to it and still
follow the plot, but doing so would
eliminate what you enjoy about the genre.
Perhaps you really do want to play the
game equivalent of "See Spot Run", with
no attention span required and some stupid
little fairy (Death to Navi!!!) telling
you what to do every few seconds. Cool,
your choice, but games like that already
exist (hint: look for "ages 3 and up"
on the box). But if you want to enjoy more
complex plots, harder gameplay, and an actual
challenge (y'know, the very reason
we play games in the first place, to challenge
ourselves?), don't complain when a game
does exactly that.
Perhaps a better way to make the point...
Pick a hard game you loved from the
classic console days (SNES era). Now,
download it and an emulator, and use every
cheat code you can find. Do you find the
game anywhere near as fun when you can
stroll through even the hardest parts
with nothing more than repetitively pressing
the fire/attack/do/whatever button, and
occasionally needing to press the control
pad to guide the character in a particular
direction?
The universe does not need Marilyn Monroe
or Shakespeare or Einstein to be known.
Neither do we, in the present.
Yet, would you consider it unfortunate if, somehow,
all traces of Bach's music vanished tomorrow? If
we woke up to find every last copy of "Army of
Darkness" eaten by moths? If some anti-intellectual
government managed to efface The Tempest (Shakespeare's
or Gaiman's version, doesn't matter which you
prefer) from human memory?
We don't "need" culture. But at least some
things seem worth keeping around.
Do not presume that humans as they exist
now represent the highest form of evolution.
Anthro-centrism is another fallacy of scifi.
The highest form? I most certainly hope not!
However, aside from our little problem with
(metaphorically and sometimes literally)
defoecating in our own living area, we represent
the highest evolution has to offer, so far, that
we know of.
Perhaps more advanced life exists out there
somewhere. Perhaps not. But why risk losing
what progress the universe has made with us
so far? All dependant on a stray asteroid, or
the sun becoming unstable (do you track the
solar weather? For a minima in the 11-year
solar cycle, we've had a scary number
of very very large CMEs lately, fortunately
none of the X30+ ones came straight at us), or
any of a number of other essentially
unpredictable and unavoidable events that
could very well wipe out all higher life on
Earth.
Do I expect such an event in my lifetime?
No. But then, neither did the dinosaurs.
At the very least, by investing in ways to
survive off-planet now, we can give
our descendants some hope of avoiding the
eventual destruction of the planet. In
reverse-dog-years, our sun has passed 50
and won't stick around forever.
The survival of the single-celled organism
was once at stake too, and instead of it being
an issue of "does the single celled culture
survive or not?", there was a third option - a
higher form of life.
True. But if all the single-celled organisms
had vanished due to a nearby GRB, that higher
form of life (ie, us) would never have existed.
And to the best of our knowledge as a species,
life may simply not exist anywhere else in
the universe to "carry the torch" should we
suddenly vanish.
So with Microsoft throwing its support
behind HD-DVD, does this mean that Sony's
Blu-ray will go the way of Betamax (and to
a lesser extent Minidisc)?
Tell me... What do you think it means that
Microsoft "supports" HD-DVD in Longhorn?
What do you think that involves?
Let me tell you - For comparison, Linux
already supports both HD-DVD and
Blu-Ray, as well as the obvious next step
of UV-Quad (with a capacity somewhere around
120GB). It might even support RA-Holo, if
such a technology gets to market soon enough.
Why, you might ask?
Because all of these drives will just use some
variety of ATA or SCSI interface. The actual
encoding on the disk, and the physical media
itself, do not matter one whit. If an OS can
write to CDs an DVDs now, and can read/write
from a HDD, it will have the ability to deal
with these new media formats without even so
much as an upgrade.
Nice PR for Microsoft, to point out they
plan to handle it, but it means nothing
at all. It means they have a functional
generic IDE driver, nothing more.
Now, filesystem support means something
entirely different. It also has nothing
to do with the underlying medium, though...
You can write a RO EXT2 to DVD. You can
use FAT32 on a CD. You can use ReiserFS
on a TEM lining up individual sodium atoms
on a gold plate, for all it matters. But
it would really surprise me if HD-DVD and
Blu-Ray chose to use something other than
UDF or yet-another-variant of ISO-9660.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying
that we have 2 ears, so we can only hear in 2
directions?
Nope, although you don't seem like the only one
to have gotten that impression, so perhaps I
phrased myself poorly...
Our outer and middle ears modify incoming, 4d
sound (4d because sound doesn't consist of a
single pressure sampling, nor does our response
to repeated stimuli remain constant) in a rather
complicated way. But no matter how impressive
that filtering (and our brain's later
interpretation thereof) may seem, all that
gets downconverted to a simple 1d pressure
measurement at the eardrum (we actually do a
sort of frequency domain transform via the
villi in the inner ear, but their input comes
from the bottleneck of the eardrum).
So, while we may run some incredible software
to process sound, that all comes from a mere
two channels (plus the far fuzzer tactile sense
of vibration).
Yes, headphones can produce the same
effects.
Well, that pretty much counts as the entirety
of my point... 200+ channels of sound, vs 2.1
channels, seems like a no-brainer to me.
But they remove the ambience from the movie
theatre experience.
Heh, well, I'll agree with you there, but
we'll have to disagree on whether or not to
consider that "good"... Aside from the big
screen, I consider the whole movie-theatre
enviroment as highly annoying, from the smell
of stale popcorn to screaming kiddies or
whispering teens, to unskippable commercials
and unpausable snack or bathroom breaks.:-)
So do they hand you your headphones when you
first enter the theatre (thus dooming you to
a particular seat), or after you sit down?
Once again, we run into an amusing attempt to
get around a fundamental limit in human
perception... We have two ears, and our skin
can detect (with almost no dicriminatory ability)
strong low-frequency sound. Two channels plus
the bass.
So why do research groups like Dolby and
Fraunhofer keep coming out with new ideas
like this "3d" sound? More channels
(given an encoding that can make use of
them) just adds degrees of freedom to where
someone can sit (ie, expands the "sweet"
spot) and get decent quality sound - At the
expense of more, higher-quality speakers,
various sound dampening and/or reflecting
materials, architectural considerations, etc.
Quality headphones and a subwoofer, OTOH, can
always do better, with no extra requirements
beyond not having too much background
noise.
This is supposed to be a promotional website
for the next two weeks for gamers to go in and
enjoy
How much effort would it take for them to have a
small, unobtrusive link on the main page that
says "click here for the hypeless version"?
Yeah, maybe most gamers will go there and drool
over the eye candy (which I couldn't even get
to work correctly, in Mozilla, and gave up after
my third click). But some of us (who will still
pay them real money to buy their product) don't
want pretty pictures, we want a game, we want a
price, we want suggested system specs.
With the amount of time it must have taken to
create that Flash abomination, would it have
hurt their schedule so much more to have
a few HTML-only pages containing actual
information?
Slashdot Mirror
But what if there was a new hashing algorithm, which even on a very fast computer could only compute one hash a second?
...Then no one would use it. Imagine a multi-user system with even a
few dozen users on at a time... Each time one of them logged on, or
changed passwords, or SU'd, or did one of the non-authentication-related
activities that would likely invoke a "good" hash (file validation,
activity on a very large DB, etc), there goes one second of CPU time.
It doesn't take much imagination to see the cumulative effects of that
as bring the system to its knees.
:-)
And even if the user(s) had no choice, either the admin or some new law said "tough, use it anyway"? Well, then the obvious solution consists of upgrading to a faster machine. And so, the "arms race" would start all over again.
One would think that a page with "watermelon" in the meta tag would at least mention it in the page itself...
Not a safe assumption. Let's say you write a page about Fermat's theorem... You might include the phrase "number theory" in the meta tags, but not mention it anywhere on the page itself. That would not count as either an oversight in the page text, nor a misuse of meta tags.
However, I have a somewhat strange thought on ways around the court's ruling... They only said that the meta tags need to fit the page's content. So what if the page specifically displays its own meta tags at the bottom? They would then match the page (even to a law-bot).
Overall, due to the vagueness and ease of circumvention, I would consider this a more-or-less meaningless ruling. It may provide a precedent for future tangentially-related trials, but I highly doubt we can apply it to the idea of spam-police going around searching for improper use of meta tags.
Mind, the problem with this media, no matter who much of a data hoarder you are (like me), you'll find ways to fill it.
Hmm, I don't know about that. Personally, I keep everything that hits my PC, and it adds up, but still hasn't come close to 2TB...
About every two years I replace my fileserver's smallest HDD with one roughly twice as large as the current largest (so I basically append a zero to the right end of the current size, expressed in binary). Currently that means almost a third of a terabyte after an upgrade this spring.
This time, I've started keeping my CD rips in a lossless format. Next time (which will put me around 0.75TB) I will probably start keeping raw DVD rips. After that, I don't know what else I might keep that could use so much room. Until now, audio and small video clips have taken the bulk of the space.
Although I know everyone who has ever said this has later eaten their words, at the moment, I really don't think any home computer needs more than a few TB of storage.
But if the media is reliable enough, I wonder what backup solutions coming out of this?
Ah, great point. That currently seems like the biggest problem we have with storage - Not the actual online storage, but the ability to keep up-to-date backups. I've worked for the past few weeks to backup my fileserver to DVD, and still have a few more discs to go. Most likely, at least a few of the over-50 DVDs I've created have errors, and in the event my FS fries, I would almost certainly lose something. Even Blu-Ray doesn't look like that great of an alternative... 25GB doesn't suck, but it still means five discs per 100GB. After my next HDD addition, that will come out to around 30 discs, almost the same situation I have now (Yes, Blu-Ray theoretically holds a lot more, up to 100GB for dual-sided dual-layer. But keep in mind that DSDL DVDs hold almost 20GB, and we've just now started seeing SSDL burners, with media incredibly scarce and expensive).
So what do we need? A solution for making backups of several hundred GB at a time, that doesn't cost more than buying a similarly-sized IDE drive and keeping it off-site (ie, tape backups, not even counting the cost of the drive itself).
They clearly did not intend to pursue the lawsuit in question, merely to make enough of a gesture to arouse interest in certain tech communities.
Bad move... Geeks, on the whole, do not count as their target audience. Most geeks I know get seriously annoyed at stories like KT's, and wouldn't even read a book like hers if stricken with dysentery and the label on all the shampoo bottles disintigrated. "Aww, someone with no clue about the dangers of rubbing themselves down with raw meat and then playing with tigers got hurt? Hear the violins?"
At best, we would spread the word to people who might read it. But we can cause a lot more damage than benefit (as shown by Amazon needing to purge their comments section this morning).
a wallpaper that can prevent hackers accessing secure networks via Wi-Fi - without blocking mobile phone signals
But... I want it to block cell phones as well.
And lining the whole house in foil just looks way too shiney for normal use...
FYI- All of the states Attorneys General have a "Consumer Protection Unit." They are charged with protecting consumers from fraudulent activity. That is why you as citizens are considered consumers in the letter.
Fair enough. But... What product does this involve? What form of fraud do these AGs wish to protect the potential "consumers" of that service from?
Offhand, I can't think of any way P2P impacts actual "consumers" in a way that state AG offices have any role in cracking down on. It may cause people to stop consuming certain products, when used illegally, but stopping copyright violations does not equal "consumer protection".
I'd have to agree, this seems like a very strange choice of words to choose purely by coincidence. I'd also consider it very strange that 46 states AGs would all spontaneously decide to crack down on P2P (regardless of why they chose to go after them).
Someone holds the strings. Word choices can give a clue as to the identity of the puppetmaster.
I would imagine that TV repairmen were originally regulated because they had to know how to safely work on open TV cabinets containing dangerous high voltages, operate test equipment on those high voltage circuits, and install suitable replacement parts that wouldn't catch on fire.
I worry about this particular money grab for exactly that reason...
Everyone so far has complained that PC techs have very little in common with TV repairmen, and should not need licensure under the same rules.
I would point out the flip side to that - Under this wonderful scheme, Lousiana would suddenly have a lot of "licensed" TV repairmen who had no clue how to safely (or successfully, for that matter) repair an actual TV.
My suggestion for all the geeks annoyed by getting such a letter? Send in your $55, add "TV Repair" to your shingle, and assuming you survive your first electrocution, sue the hell out of the state for making you think you had the skills needed to safely do that job... "Well, they said I could, and in fact, they even said I had to!"
Brohn confirmed that he signed the letter but said he didn't write it.
"That wasn't my choice of words," he said.
Dear Mr. Brohn...
Take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.
Oh, don't like that? Sorry, not my words, I just added my name to 'em for this post. You'll have to take the issue up with Kurt Vonnegut.
Or is a 52 ounce Mountain Dew now a standard beverage for normal college students?
Well, it makes a good start for the morning...
Keep in mind that a two-liter bottle contains (approximately) 67oz. So that just comes out to "take a big swig and pour the rest of the bottle in a cup for the drive in".
Then later in the day, when that runs out, they can start hitting the coffee.
I don't see the point in putting a traditional infra-red laser when this obviously superior laser can read all.
;-)
Okay, time for the day's lesson, "Color transmittance and reflectance"...
For a pressed aluminum disc, you could use any currently-available wavelength of LZD you wanted, it will reflect them all very very well.
For a burned disc, you don't have just a pitted aluminum layer that either reflects or disperses the light from the drive. You have a dye that, due to the action of a particular frequency laser shining on it, has turned more-or-less permanantly opaque (or transparent) to certain frequencies of light.
The particular frequencies the dye will block or let pass vary enormously on the particular dye used, as well as the power and frequency of the laser used for writing data.
So, while we finally have a fairly standard set of DVD and CD dyes that work with each other, that all changes when you add in another frequency laser. Suddenly we'll find ourselves back to the early days of CD-Rs, where some drives could read some brands, and others couldn't.
So what do I see as the problem here? Sure, Sony can claim that their spiffy new drive will read "DVDs" and "CDs"... By which they mean pressed, commercially-manufactured DVDs and CDs. Don't hold your breath for that to also mean compatibility with either your particular drive and/or your favorite brand of media to burn to.
And rewritables? Don't feel too surprised when we learn that sticking a rewritable into a Blu-Ray just to try to read it has the unintended side-effect of erasing it.
Now, if I felt like going into conspiracy-theorist mode here, I would suggest that breaking compatibility with home-burned media seems like a very nice perk to all the Big Boys, who would love to put the CD- and DVD-burner genie back in the bottle...
But I won't go there. Not today.
What about real peripherals? Ones you can't emulate?
;-)
Fair enough point - But in that case, I would have to consider the computer secondary to the machine itself - I don't know your specific situation, but the computer most likely did data collection and analysis. The controller-proper I would consider part of the "peripheral", and search for the easiest-to-tap connection as the point to break away from reality and into emulation.
I'll admit, I hadn't considered that point. You can't emulate a fatigue testing machine. You can't emulate a GC/MS. You can't emulate a CNC. You can't emulate an MRI. But I see that as similar to saying you can't emulate a car... You could fake-out a car's computer, but it doesn't do much good without car itself. Apples and Oranges.
So no, emulation won't solve all obsolescence problems... But for those situations where you wouldn't consider the computer as secondary to the peripheral...
However - as I touched on above, you can almost certainly still replace the computer portion of the system. At some point, the computer just takes a digital input, and at that point, you make the split from reality. My car doesn't care if its own computer runs it, or a PC sitting in the passenger seat. That might not do much to reduce the maintenence costs of the primary machine involved, but it does mean you can have your data on something other than an ancient reel-to-reel...
The problem is, emulators are all well and good, until you actualy need to access a periphrial.
So you emulate those, as well... And usually, they take a lot less to emulate than the core system.
As a trivial example, consider the peripherals available even on previous-gen consoles... You have 3rd party joysticks, mice, keyboards, cameras, tape drives, printers(?), etc. All those eventually end up emulated, if enough people needed them.
The same goes for something like a PDP-11 or VAX 11/750 or the like. You have some odd storage devices (that store a tiny fraction of modern HDDs, thus you can emulate them with an image file). You have printers (emulatable with... printers!). Perhaps really ancient input devices such as a cardreader (scanner -> conversion tool -> file). No doubt other exotic peripherals exist, but you can somehow emulate them all.
The conceptual problem with dealing with peripherals I think lies in just how much we've advanced since the days of Big Iron... Even for emulating CPU-cycle-critical hardware interactions, you can deal with it in emulation, by pure brute-force. Consider the 11/780, which ran at a whopping 6MHz. On a modern P4, that means you have over 500 CPU cycles per emulated cycle (and while the P4 can push through more than two ops per clock, the VAX only managed one instruction per 6(?) clocks, meaning you realistically have over six thousand real instructions per emulated one, on average). With six thousand instructions to burn, you could emulate your VAX while still getting a good framerate playing Super Metroid on an emulated SuperNes in the foreground.
That I know of, only the humble old laserdisc has thus far resisted attempts at perfect emulation, due to using an analog encoding scheme (rather than storing bits, it actually encoded the raw NTSC or PAL signal handled by the TV. And depending on what sort of access to them you need, even that problem has a way around it, via an MPEG rip and a frame file (ala Daphne).
It is also not acceptable to have a faulty speedometer in a car.
The law does, however, allow tolerances on both speedometers and radar guns, a point you seem determined not to accept as a possibility. Yet, either (or both, to a driver's combined detriment) can go near the limit of their allowed tolerance and not count as "faulty", yet show a speed different from the car's "real" speed.
No one argued what the law says. Some may call it unfair or grounded only in profit, but we all know what a speed limit of 50MPH means. However, if you have overly zealous cops busting people for doing 2MPH over, when both the speedometer and radar guns have (as an example, don't happen to know the exact tolerances off the top of my head) a 5MPH tolerance, you have a situation where compliance with the law becomes a guessing game rather than a well-defined set of rules.
You will note that I did not mention your speedometer.
If you are DRIVING at a certain speed (and let's call it 80mph for ease this time perhaps) that is over the speed limit, then you are liable to be penalised
So, by what magical means do you suggest a person know their current speed, since you do not appear to care about the tolerances allowed in existing speed measurement devices?
Personally I can't wait to have averaging speed cameras along the entire UK motorway and major roads network.
Why, so you can keep paying to replace them when pissed motorists trash them? Yeah, okay.
Actually, as much as the world seem to consider the US concerned about privacy over almost everything else, I wish we had the same sense of civil disobedience you Brits have. From "Angle Grinder Man" to traffic cameras having an average lifetime of about three days... Here, we just quietly put up with crap like that. Pathetic.
HOURS per song?!? What the heck are you using?
FAAC, in the highest quality mode it offers. If you have gotten rips in 3x realtime, I have to suspect that your encoder optimizes for speed rather than quality. Sure, drop all the settings down to their simplest, and it will encode nice 'n zippy - But you get something barely better than an MP3.
Then again, I haven't tried it in a few months. Perhaps AAC encoders have made a huge leap forward since then.
If anyone out there really wants to put Real's crap on their iPod then I say let them. I feel sorry for the people that think Real has good software.
I'll agree with that 100%... I in no way meant to defend Real in the sense of them having a format worth using. But in the sense of "I own this device, I want to play format X on it, they have made it possible", I fully support that. Kinda like the whole Hall/Voltaire freedom of speech thing... "I disapprove of what format you play, but I will defend to the death your right to play it".
Actually, as an aside, I Like AAC. Take away the DRM, and I'd probably use that over OGG, even (I know, heresy <G>). But the encoding process takes hours per song, and I don't have the time (or a lab over which to distribute the load) to re-rip my entire collection that slowly.
Wow. The level of Apple fanboyism just blows me away...
People work tirelessly to get Linux to run on the XBox, against MS's wishes, and we cheer them on.
People modify their TIVOs, in violation of both their warrantee and (probably) the DMCA, and we ask how to do it ourselves.
A disposeable digital camera hits the market, and do we feel "concern" that the poor manufacturer will get raked over the coals as soon as a way to get at the memory hits the 'net? Hell NO! We ask where we can buy a few, anticipating the eventual crack!
But Real, after trying to convince Apple to make a deal with them, manages to open up the iPod, a HARDWARE device that people BUY, to play RealMedia content on, and suddenly everyone starts crying for Apple and damning Real?
Pathetic. If you replaced "Apple/RealMedia" with "Microsoft/Ogg", we'd have taken to the streets ready to lynch Microsoft over their suppression of open audio formats.
Please, people, try to use just a little bit of introspection before jumping to Apple's defense. Even try the example I gave above - If you replace "Apple" or "Jobs" with "Microsoft" or "Gates", would you feel the same? Or perhaps even more painful to contemplate, what if Apple had hacked the Nomad, against CL's wishes, to play their DRM'd AAC files? "Bad, evil DMCA violation", or "noble and liberating support of their customer's rights to use the music they legitimately purchased"? If those don't hurt to contemplate, well... "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt".
If somebody made an eBook reader which could display my content instead of theirs (and which isn't particulary expensive), I'm all for it.
I think the problem here stems from the expectations of the eBook manufacturers...
They hope to get in on the start of a content distribution system similar to a modern video-game console - ie, total lock-in to their chosen format and "branded" titles. All via a hefty dose of two-way DRM (no unauthorized content, and unauthorized viewing of content on other devices).
I sincerely believe that, and that alone, has caused the failure thus far of the eBook.
Regarding the screen - An easy-on-the-eyes display would go a long way toward getting people to "snuggle up in bed" with an eBook. But merely creating a display that looks exactly like paper, with the same easiness on the eyes, will not make or kill eBooks. As an example, everyone I know with a Palm (or similar portable) stores at least a few books on it, reading them when they have to wait somewhere (airport, bathroom, boring meetings, etc). If you've ever used a handheld to read anything longer than notes to yourself, you realize they do not make your eyes happy. Yet people will still put in 10+ hours a week reading on one.
Book-like formats - Nope, these won't save eBooks either. Referring back to people I know who read books on their Palm, they don't use any fancy text layout (at best, HTML-like). They view plain text.
Overall, this boils down to basically one point... CONTENT! Exactly as you suggest, I require of any potential eBook that I can go and download the entire Project Guttenberg library, and instantly have access to thousands of classic texts. It should, at a minimum, have the ability to process plaintext and HTML, and PDF would help quite a bit as well (though I realize that might involve nasty licensing issues, and could live without it).
If the manufacturer wants to release their own content optimized for their reader, hey, cool, I have no problem with that. But if they restrict me to what they release, they can consider me a non-customer.
Two other, lesser points...
One, battery life. I can read for 8+ hours on an old Palm. If an eBook reader doesn't have a similar battery life, I would consider that a BIG negative.
And two, physical media... Ideally, an eBook reader would simply use either ISO9660-formatted CDs (and as a bonus, let me listen to music if I so desire it... No point in letting existing hardware go unused), or have the ability to see USB keychain-style drives. I could burn anything I want to CD and/or copy it to my keychain drive, and dump it over to the eBook. No special cartridges or proprietary cables to hook it up to my PC/vendor kiosks... Just keep it simple and well-known.
Its the fact that clusters require higher skill to program efficiently for than do single processor systems.
...vs This year's topology from Cray or SGI
or the like. Yeah, whatever.
If I know MPI (which I do), I can code on any cluster out there, and it will perform similarly, with a linear time dependance on network speed. Including most supercomputing architectures. By comparison, if I know HPF, well, I can write code that will at least run on most supercomputer topologies, but run efficiently? All at the whim of the manufacturer, and whether or not they had my particular problem (or a similar variant) in mind when optimizing their compilers.
The other point is that by using off the shelf parts, we are not really innovating in this space like we should be.
Define "should"...
Customer X wants a supercomputer to perform a few set tasks. He can pay you to "innovate", or he can pay your competitor 3% of your costs for a setup that will wildly outperform your top-of-the-line machine. And you see a problem with using commodity parts?
An important part of "innovation" involves making the best use of what you have available today. Sure, tomorrow that may mean quantum coprocessors, and at the absolute limit, it may well mean coming scarily close to breaking the laws of physics.
For the present, however, it means using a cluster of Opterons.
For you to say "don't bother" is idiotic; we're telling you "we enjoy this, so consider making it and you can make good money if you do it right."
Wow, relax! I think you took his point FAR more harshly than he meant it...
Yes, games tend to have a few features that universally waste time, which we would all like eliminated. He mentioned that (the long FMVs in FFX, as the example).
But playing an RPG requires time. The entire point involves basically playing out a book, with the best ones allowing you to define the plot. If you reduce that "book" to "Dick & Jane", sure, you can commit less time to it and still follow the plot, but doing so would eliminate what you enjoy about the genre.
Perhaps you really do want to play the game equivalent of "See Spot Run", with no attention span required and some stupid little fairy (Death to Navi!!!) telling you what to do every few seconds. Cool, your choice, but games like that already exist (hint: look for "ages 3 and up" on the box). But if you want to enjoy more complex plots, harder gameplay, and an actual challenge (y'know, the very reason we play games in the first place, to challenge ourselves?), don't complain when a game does exactly that.
Perhaps a better way to make the point... Pick a hard game you loved from the classic console days (SNES era). Now, download it and an emulator, and use every cheat code you can find. Do you find the game anywhere near as fun when you can stroll through even the hardest parts with nothing more than repetitively pressing the fire/attack/do/whatever button, and occasionally needing to press the control pad to guide the character in a particular direction?
The universe does not need Marilyn Monroe or Shakespeare or Einstein to be known.
Neither do we, in the present.
Yet, would you consider it unfortunate if, somehow, all traces of Bach's music vanished tomorrow? If we woke up to find every last copy of "Army of Darkness" eaten by moths? If some anti-intellectual government managed to efface The Tempest (Shakespeare's or Gaiman's version, doesn't matter which you prefer) from human memory?
We don't "need" culture. But at least some things seem worth keeping around.
Do not presume that humans as they exist now represent the highest form of evolution. Anthro-centrism is another fallacy of scifi.
The highest form? I most certainly hope not!
However, aside from our little problem with (metaphorically and sometimes literally) defoecating in our own living area, we represent the highest evolution has to offer, so far, that we know of.
Perhaps more advanced life exists out there somewhere. Perhaps not. But why risk losing what progress the universe has made with us so far? All dependant on a stray asteroid, or the sun becoming unstable (do you track the solar weather? For a minima in the 11-year solar cycle, we've had a scary number of very very large CMEs lately, fortunately none of the X30+ ones came straight at us), or any of a number of other essentially unpredictable and unavoidable events that could very well wipe out all higher life on Earth.
Do I expect such an event in my lifetime? No. But then, neither did the dinosaurs. At the very least, by investing in ways to survive off-planet now, we can give our descendants some hope of avoiding the eventual destruction of the planet. In reverse-dog-years, our sun has passed 50 and won't stick around forever.
The survival of the single-celled organism was once at stake too, and instead of it being an issue of "does the single celled culture survive or not?", there was a third option - a higher form of life.
True. But if all the single-celled organisms had vanished due to a nearby GRB, that higher form of life (ie, us) would never have existed. And to the best of our knowledge as a species, life may simply not exist anywhere else in the universe to "carry the torch" should we suddenly vanish.
So with Microsoft throwing its support behind HD-DVD, does this mean that Sony's Blu-ray will go the way of Betamax (and to a lesser extent Minidisc)?
Tell me... What do you think it means that Microsoft "supports" HD-DVD in Longhorn?
What do you think that involves?
Let me tell you - For comparison, Linux already supports both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, as well as the obvious next step of UV-Quad (with a capacity somewhere around 120GB). It might even support RA-Holo, if such a technology gets to market soon enough.
Why, you might ask?
Because all of these drives will just use some variety of ATA or SCSI interface. The actual encoding on the disk, and the physical media itself, do not matter one whit. If an OS can write to CDs an DVDs now, and can read/write from a HDD, it will have the ability to deal with these new media formats without even so much as an upgrade.
Nice PR for Microsoft, to point out they plan to handle it, but it means nothing at all. It means they have a functional generic IDE driver, nothing more.
Now, filesystem support means something entirely different. It also has nothing to do with the underlying medium, though... You can write a RO EXT2 to DVD. You can use FAT32 on a CD. You can use ReiserFS on a TEM lining up individual sodium atoms on a gold plate, for all it matters. But it would really surprise me if HD-DVD and Blu-Ray chose to use something other than UDF or yet-another-variant of ISO-9660.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that we have 2 ears, so we can only hear in 2 directions?
:-)
Nope, although you don't seem like the only one to have gotten that impression, so perhaps I phrased myself poorly...
Our outer and middle ears modify incoming, 4d sound (4d because sound doesn't consist of a single pressure sampling, nor does our response to repeated stimuli remain constant) in a rather complicated way. But no matter how impressive that filtering (and our brain's later interpretation thereof) may seem, all that gets downconverted to a simple 1d pressure measurement at the eardrum (we actually do a sort of frequency domain transform via the villi in the inner ear, but their input comes from the bottleneck of the eardrum).
So, while we may run some incredible software to process sound, that all comes from a mere two channels (plus the far fuzzer tactile sense of vibration).
Yes, headphones can produce the same effects.
Well, that pretty much counts as the entirety of my point... 200+ channels of sound, vs 2.1 channels, seems like a no-brainer to me.
But they remove the ambience from the movie theatre experience.
Heh, well, I'll agree with you there, but we'll have to disagree on whether or not to consider that "good"... Aside from the big screen, I consider the whole movie-theatre enviroment as highly annoying, from the smell of stale popcorn to screaming kiddies or whispering teens, to unskippable commercials and unpausable snack or bathroom breaks.
So do they hand you your headphones when you first enter the theatre (thus dooming you to a particular seat), or after you sit down?
Once again, we run into an amusing attempt to get around a fundamental limit in human perception... We have two ears, and our skin can detect (with almost no dicriminatory ability) strong low-frequency sound. Two channels plus the bass.
So why do research groups like Dolby and Fraunhofer keep coming out with new ideas like this "3d" sound? More channels (given an encoding that can make use of them) just adds degrees of freedom to where someone can sit (ie, expands the "sweet" spot) and get decent quality sound - At the expense of more, higher-quality speakers, various sound dampening and/or reflecting materials, architectural considerations, etc. Quality headphones and a subwoofer, OTOH, can always do better, with no extra requirements beyond not having too much background noise.
This is supposed to be a promotional website for the next two weeks for gamers to go in and enjoy
How much effort would it take for them to have a small, unobtrusive link on the main page that says "click here for the hypeless version"?
Yeah, maybe most gamers will go there and drool over the eye candy (which I couldn't even get to work correctly, in Mozilla, and gave up after my third click). But some of us (who will still pay them real money to buy their product) don't want pretty pictures, we want a game, we want a price, we want suggested system specs.
With the amount of time it must have taken to create that Flash abomination, would it have hurt their schedule so much more to have a few HTML-only pages containing actual information?